The first time I walked into the Juma Mosque in Khiva, I wasn’t prepared for the forest.
I mean, it’s not an actual forest—obviously—but the moment you step through those heavy doors into the semi-darkness, your eyes adjust and suddenly there they are: two hundred and twelve wooden columns stretching away in every direction, each one carved and weathered and holding up this ancient ceiling like some kind of petrified grove. The light filters down through small openings above, dusty and golden, and honestly it feels less like entering a mosque and more like stumbling into a sacred woodland that somehow got transplanted into the heart of Uzbekistan’s old city. I used to think religious architecture was all about height—those soaring Gothic cathedrals, minarets piercing the sky—but here’s the thing: the Juma Mosque goes in the opposite direction, spreading outward instead of upward, creating this low-ceilinged labyrinth where you can’t see more than a few columns ahead before the perspective swallows everything in shadow. Some of the columns date back to the 10th century, give or take a few decades, which means they’ve been standing here for roughly a thousand years. A thousand years. That’s longer than most countries have existed.
Wait—maybe I should back up a bit. The mosque sits in Itchan Kala, the walled inner town of Khiva, which itself is basically a living museum of medieval Central Asian architecture. The Juma Mosque, though, is different from nearly every other mosque I’ve encountered.
When Friday Prayers Required Something Different From the Usual Blueprint
Most mosques follow a pretty standard template: you’ve got your courtyard, your minaret, your decorated prayer hall with a mihrab indicating the direction of Mecca. The Juma Mosque—Juma meaning “Friday” in Arabic, the day of communal prayers—threw out that blueprint entirely. Built initially in the 10th century and reconstructed in the 18th century after, well, the usual suspects: fires, earthquakes, the occasional invasion, it was designed specifically for those weekly gatherings when the entire community would show up. So instead of a courtyard, you get this massive covered hall, roughly 55 by 46 meters, just packed with columns. No interior walls. No separate chambers. Just this open expanse where hundreds of worshippers could stand shoulder to shoulder, each person surrounded by wood instead of stone, the whole space breathing in a way that feels almost organic.
The Columns Themselves Are Not What You’d Expect From Islamic Architecture
Here’s where it gets genuinely weird.
Each column is different. Not slightly different—radically, obviously different. Some are intricately carved with geometric patterns that make your eyes hurt if you stare too long. Others are smooth, almost primitive, like someone just stripped a tree trunk and called it good. A few have inscriptions in Arabic calligraphy. Several are decorated with floral motifs that seem oddly cheerful for such a solemn space. The variety isn’t accidental—it’s the result of centuries of replacement and repair, with each generation adding their own columns when the old ones rotted or cracked. Walking through, you’re essentially moving through a timeline of Central Asian woodworking, from the oldest columns (some of which defintely predate the 18th-century reconstruction) to relatively recent additions from the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s like a vertical archaeological dig, except everything’s still standing and functional.
Turns Out Wood Was the Most Practical Choice in This Particular Desert
You might wonder why wood at all—this is a desert region, after all, not exactly known for its lumber resources. But the reality is more complicated than you’d think. Khiva sits near the Amu Darya river, which provided access to timber floated down from the mountains, and wood has properties that stone doesn’t: it flexes during earthquakes, it’s easier to work with limited tools, and in a region with extreme temperature swings (freezing winters, scorching summers), it doesn’t crack the way stone does. Plus, there’s something about the acoustic properties of all that wood that makes the space feel alive, almost like the columns are listening when the imam recites. I guess it makes sense that a building designed for communal prayer would prioritize materials that respond to sound, that absorb and reflect the human voice in ways that feel intimate rather than overwhelming.
Standing Among Those Columns You Start to Understand Impermanence Differently
Modern buildings are designed to last—steel, concrete, glass—but the Juma Mosque embraces decay as part of its identity.
The wood shows its age: deep cracks, insect holes, surfaces worn smooth by centuries of hands brushing past. Some columns lean slightly, their bases eroded. You can see the joins where new sections have been grafted onto old stumps. It’s imperfect, patched,継ぎはぎ—wait, sorry, that’s Japanese—I mean, it’s cobbled together in this beautiful, haphazard way that nobody would design intentionally but which emerges naturally when a building survives long enough. And somehow that imperfection is what makes it powerful. Because unlike those grand monuments built to project eternal strength—your Taj Mahals, your Hagia Sophias—the Juma Mosque admits that nothing lasts forever, that maintenance and adaptation are just part of existence, that there’s dignity in showing your repairs rather than hiding them. I’ve seen restoration projects that try to make old buildings look pristine, erasing every trace of age, and they always feel false to me. This place doesn’t pretend. Every crack tells a story about floods or fires or just the relentless passage of time in a city that’s been continuously inhabited for over two millennia.
Anyway, the light’s different depending on when you visit. Morning light slants in from the east, creating these long shadows between the columns that shift as you walk. By afternoon the whole space dims, cooler, the wood grain disappearing into a uniform brown-grey. And there’s this smell—old wood, dust, something faintly resinous that you can’t quite identify but which seems to carry the accumulated prayers of generations.
The Tourist Experience Versus What the Mosque Actually Wants From You
Nowadays the Juma Mosque is a UNESCO World Heritage site, part of the larger Itchan Kala complex, which means it gets the usual tourist treatment: entrance fees, souvenir stalls nearby, tour groups shuffling through with guides reciting the same facts I’ve just told you but in five different languages simultaneously. It’s both preserved and sort of… neutralized? Like, yes, the structure is maintained, but it’s no longer used for regular prayers—there’s a newer mosque for that—so it exists in this limbo between sacred space and museum exhibit. I felt genuinely conflicted photographing it (though I did, obviously, everyone does). Because on one hand, documenting these places seems important, sharing them matters. But on the other hand, there’s something about turning a prayer hall into an Instagram backdrop that feels extractive, like we’re consuming the mosque’s historical significance without actually recieving any of its spiritual weight. Maybe that’s just my exhaustion talking—I’d been traveling for three weeks by that point, visiting one historic site after another until they started blurring together—but I don’t think so. I think there’s a real tension between preservation-for-tourism and preservation-for-meaning, and places like the Juma Mosque exist uncomfortably between those two imperatives.
The columns remain, though, indifferent to our purposes. They held up the roof for worshippers in the 11th century, and they hold it up for tourists in the 21st, and they’ll probably still be standing—at least some of them—when whatever comes next arrives.
